That was the large printing in three lines in all capital letters, in yellow on a black base, the feature meant to attract the shopper’s attention. The sticker was about two by three inches in size, in bright yellow above and beneath the black box in which "Unadvertised Hobby Special" was printed. Below those keywords was "Prev. Sold At" with a space for a price and "SPECIAL PRICE" again in All Capital Letters with a space for another price. The prices were marked in purple ink with a hand-held price marker, the one that was once utilized to mark the tops of cans of groceries in supermarkets when I was a child, long before the days of Universal Product Codes and Price Marked on Shelf Only. The original price was $1.99 and the sale price was 99 cents, a little more than fifty percent off!

And the top part of the sticker was imprinted with the logo of the place holding the Unadvertised Hobby Special.

Two Guys.

Or, to be more specific, "Two Guys From Harrison."

The "Harrison" in this case was in New Jersey, a small municipality just to the east of Downtown Newark and a few miles to the west of my hometown of Jersey City. The Two Guys were brothers Herbert and Sidney Hubschman, who started out quite modestly in 1946 by selling what we now know as "scratch and dent" television sets purchased from the RCA factory also in Harrison. With a price point of just five dollars over their cost, the entire lot of TVs was gone in just a few hours from the vacant lot which the Hubschmans had set up for that purpose. From there the brothers opened a discount store, which undercut more traditional dealers to the point of them complaining, "We can’t compete with those Two Guys From Harrison!" Except that said more traditional dealers didn’t use the word "Guys" when describing them. The actual word wasn’t printable at the time. From that modest, and sworn at, beginning, Two Guys grew to more than one hundred stores, mostly in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic, but with a few in California as well.

When we moved from the city to the suburbs, I, as a six year old, had already known of Two Guys. In fact, a story my mother repeated to anyone who would listen well after it was appropriate to relate was that when I was three years old, I got lost in the Two Guys on Route 440 in Jersey City and, believing that my mom and dad had left without me, walked completely out of the store. I was returned to the Courtesy Desk by a concerned grownup and reunited via the announcement, "We have some lost parents..." Despite this incident, which for some reason became a cornerstone in my personal history above and beyond my stellar performance in school or any other positive accomplishment whatsoever, I was still a major fan of Two Guys. (Incidentally, each of my kids walked out of a store in a different mall at the same age, perhaps proving that there is something to genetic predisposition.) They had toys, they had records, they even had a small arcade, and they had model trains... lots of model trains.

The box I was holding, at a train show some three decades after the demise of Two Guys in 1982, contained just that: an "Aurora Postage Stamp Building and Bridge Series" kit for a large three part bridge: an arched span in the center with two smaller truss spans either side, atop four piers that were in segments allowing the modeler to customize the height somewhat. This kit could be built as either a single track or double track version. It was in what became my chosen scale: N, at a proportion of 1/160th actual size. The kit was marketed by Aurora, which was much better known before and after its brief foray into model railroad for its electric racing car sets. (I had one of those too.) But it was made in West Germany by a company called Faller, which is not only still in business, but still makes this particular kit and many others sold under the Postage Stamp Line, and also available after that in the United States and Canada under other brand names. Aurora also marketed the actual trains—diesel and steam locomotives, and passenger and freight cars—made by a company called Trix, also headquartered in West Germany, which also made the N Scale track, with rails nine millimeters apart, for sale under the Aurora brand. (One story of how the scale became named "N" was for the Nine millimeter track gauge, which is extremely close to an exact representation of the four feet, eight and one half inch gauge of most North American railroads.) The Postage Stamp moniker appeared perhaps most famously on a "bookshelf" train set which was the way that new entrants could start in N Scale: a locomotive, several cars, a minimum sized circle or oval of track, and a "power pack" that stepped down and converted household current to the 12 volts DC that was needed to run these models. Perhaps "models" isn’t quite the right term; they were more like "representations" or "depictions" when compared to what they could be. There were plenty of paint schemes that didn’t exist (example: the bright green of the Penn Central on a wooden boxcar from far earlier in the Twentieth Century—nope!) and lots of compromises to enable reduction from full size. But it was state of the art at the time, and we largely didn’t mind.

Two Guys carried model trains all year round, and the branch closest to the home to which we moved after Jersey City contained a well stocked department. My memory is much less clear about the specific location of this department in the store than I would have expected, so I’m no more than a little confident that it was near the in-house supermarket part of this particular branch of Two Guys, a few paces away from the Record Department which was near one of the two main entrances, and of course right next to the toys. The train section had much more than Aurora Postage Stamp N Scale Trains; the bulk of the square footage was devoted to the larger and far more popular HO Scale, which at the time was a staple of almost every first and second tier department store.

So every day at Two Guys could be Christmas for me if my father was in a giving mood, or if I had been gifted a dollar or two from one of my aunts or uncles or my grandparents on my father’s side. (More often that not, though, it was an exercise in frustration: so much to buy, so little I could afford. Some things never change.)

But it was not even in the days prior to Christmas that Two Guys really hit its stride for a few years in the 1970s.

Amazingly, it actually peaked on the Day After Christmas.

There have been stories of the pandemonium-bordering-on-anarchy that was the Filene’s Basement Sale in Boston, and by that I do actually mean the basement of the once-well-known department store at their flagship downtown location, which closed in 2007. I suppose these accounts pale in comparison to the madness of contemporary Black Friday Sales; as far as I know there were no Death Tolls at Filene’s Basement, unlike, sadly, more than once in the pre-dawn hours of the Day after Thanksgiving in the United States. But they were notable enough to rate media coverage not only in Boston, but elsewhere around the country, certainly in the Greater New York City area. The images of (mostly) ladies not exactly being lady-like as they competed, tussled, lunged, and apparently sometimes worse, for the automatically marked down clothing items located beneath the main Filene’s, was the stuff of legend—and the place itself was a huge tourist attraction.

But I’m here to tell you that even the "Running of The Brides," the annual wedding dress sale at Filene’s Basement, would have a hard time competing with the intensity and energy of the Legendary Two Guys After Christmas Sales. And it completely blew away the stereotype that only women shopped like this that the opposite gender, including my father, often misogynistically made fun of, and not always in "fun."

So picture if you will the relatively early morning of December 26. An "early opening" for the Day after Christmas? No, opening was "regular time" then, 9, 9:30 or 10, no special "crack of dawn" or before... more civilized, perhaps. But what that did mean is a longer lineup of men and boys— almost exclusively, I would say— that were backed up well beyond the Main Entrance to the Two Guys closest to our house, and I’m sure every other participating location as well. My father and I were usually pretty close to the front of this line, having had plenty of practice from our early arrival at train shows; the better to get a full view of everything available, and snag the bargains.

But there was a lot of competition. When the weather wasn’t so great, the queue was probably a couple hundred people; with better weather, it was probably double that.

The doors opened, and the first in line stepped on the rubber mats which actuated the automatic openers. Hopefully the Two Guys employees had time to get out of the way as the rush of Model Train Hunters moved as one, first to capture a shopping cart or hand held basket, or both, and then directly toward the toys and hobbies department at a brisk pace-- or faster. This was no train show, where the mob typically split up and headed for different parts of the venue in search of different items. At Two Guys, everything that wasn’t locked in a case, which was a small percentage of the total stock, was crammed into both sides of one long aisle. It was probably one hundred linear feet of trains on shelves that stood a good seven feet high.

"Crammed" would also describe the state of the people in that aisle along which the trains were stocked. I’m sure the crowd of shoppers more than exceeded any fire department safety guidelines. Fortunately, the space occupied by the shopping carts allowed for space for the many participants in this contest to breathe, assuming that they weren’t hyperventilating at the sight of this cornucopia of material ripe for the taking at Greatly Reduced Prices. Others, just a bit late to the event, needed to wait outside the aisle, hoping for an opening and keeping their fingers crossed that what they came for wasn’t already gone by the time it was their turn.

Once positioned, my father and I got to work, executing the plan we had developed in advance. He took the higher shelves, and I took the lower ones, and we grabbed and dropped anything that we thought we might want into the cart, not stopping to second guess choices lest someone else capture them first. My father’s choices were almost all rolling stock in HO Scale: freight and passenger cars, steam and diesel locomotives. If there were scenic accessories, like automobiles, sets of scale model people, and cargo, those went into the cart as well. Once in a while a building would go in as well, although there really was no room for it on his train layout in the basement. I generally knew what he was looking for as well, and so I assisted from the lower shelves. For once my status as a kid, and not a terribly large or tall one at the time, was an advantage. It also let me move among the other shoppers to seek out what I wanted for my growing N Scale accumulation.

And just what did I want out of what was available?

There were freight cars—hundreds of them—marked down to as low as fifty-nine cents. Where well stocked hobby shops like the Model Railroad Equipment Corporation in Midtown Manhattan—a place so famous that its owner was on the panel show To Tell The Truth—might have one or two copies of a single freight car, Two Guys had dozens. How many red and white Great Northern boxcars did you need?

There were building kits, some discounted to forty-nine cents, boxes and boxes of them. I wouldn’t need more than one of each, except for the residential kits where I could justify having several of the same—a housing development of sort, in miniature. There was track—straight track, curved track, and switches. Some packages were as low as nineteen cents. Almost all of it was of the Aurora Postage Stamp brand. The only thing I avoided was the extra track and accessories meant to be used with the Postage Stamp "Bus System," which even I could discern was way oversize for N Scale. (The actual sets were among the merchandise locked up.) I did admit that it was cool that they used the same controller that their race car sets did, which made sense because they were built atop the same general chassis design.

The sheer volume of material was overwhelming, and it was still just a fraction of the overall largess. I could swear that there were more of these train items for sale on Unadvertised Hobby Specials this day than was available on the days leading up to Christmas. Just where did they get this stuff? (I would, much later, discover a possible answer to that question, but that’s another story.)

With the cart full—or maybe overflowing, I’ll concede-- we moved to Phase Two of my father’s plan. Moving completely out of the chaos of the Toys and Hobbies section, we retreated to another section of the store, pausing to grab an empty shopping cart along the way. In the quiet of a portion of Two Guys that did not have any Unadvertised Hobby Specials, we carefully went through our preliminary selections, sorting through one at a time, eliminating duplicates, and placing what we didn’t want into the other cart.

Finding a part of the store that wasn’t inhabited was especially easy when December 26 fell on a Sunday and the Blue Laws were still in effect. By the time of the After-Christmas sales, there weren’t many places left that still had them, but my state was one of them. Entire large areas of the store were roped off because nothing from those areas could legally be sold on Sundays, including clothes, home goods and appliances, for example. That did not stop us from moving just inside the ropes to sort through what we did and didn’t want from the Hobby Department. I suppose it didn’t make sense that we could buy model trains but not a pair of socks, but there you go. Even now in Bergen County, New Jersey, the Blue Laws remain in effect.

My father had the wherewithal to buy pretty much anything he wanted during the sale, but I didn’t. Even at the Unadvertised Hobby Special prices, my Christmas gift money couldn’t pay for everything I’d put in the cart. So the trade-offs began. Did I want the Swift Refrigerator Car boxcar or the Western Maryland hopper? What about the Mobilgas Jumbo Tank Car instead? Or the Baltimore and Ohio gondola, or the Santa Fe covered gondola? How about the depressed center flat car? Or the flat car with two "piggyback" trailers lettered "Burlington"? The "container car" that I wasn’t sure actually existed? And what was this "Longitudinal Hopper" anyway? Was that real? (They both were prototypical, but I didn’t know this yet.)

Or maybe I should stick to buildings. I could buy the Rural Station kit, though it didn’t look very American. (It wasn’t, like most of the Faller/Postage Stamp kits.) Then there were the "Three Station Platforms" and the "Mansion with Pool." Or maybe stick with the Houses Under Construction kit, which had three houses in various stages of completion? There was the "Two Custom Houses" kit, that looked more like a pair of Swiss Chalets to me than anything I’d find locally. There was a "Barn, Silo and Chicken Coop" that I’d had my eye on for some time. What about the Bus Stop, that was only forty-nine cents. (It was way oversized, as it was meant to be used with the Aurora "Bus System.") Did I really need another switch or could I get by without it? The Trix-made track that Aurora marketed wasn’t quite a fit with the Atlas brand track that I used for my layout, so should all of that go back?

And then there was the entire Penn Central Train Set, which had two locomotives, one powered, one not powered, and four passenger carsin simulated stainless steel, well, plastic painted silver, anyway. That cost more than all of the other rolling stock I had picked up for possible purchase combined.

Decisions, decisions...

Sometimes, but not always, my father would help with my purchases, either outright or for my forthcoming birthday. And sometimes within that sometimes, it meant that he made the choices about what N Scale items to keep and which were going back to the shelf. This wasn’t limited to trips to Two Guys. Nor was it limited to my earlier childhood. At any rate, the Penn Central set was headed back to the shelf.

And yes, the items did go back to the shelf. My father didn’t believe in just leaving the unselected merchandise in the department in which we’d sorted through the pile we’d taken from Toys and Hobbies, or even just shuttling it back to the general vicinity of the sale. He took and closely guarded the "Keep" cart, I pushed the "Don’t Keep" cart, and we returned to the still bustling aisle from which we’d just picked out our nominated items, to restock the non-winners. At times the returns would be taken out of our hands as we tried to put them back on the shelves. At other times, we’d be politely asked, "Are you going to buy that?" and they never made it to the shelf then either. By this time the shelves looked like a bit of a Train Wreck anyway, so it probably didn’t matter much whether we attempted to place the unpicked model trains precisely back where we’d found them.

It was all over in less than an hour, plus or minus depending on how long it took to check out. My father usually used cash to pay for his purchase, though there was the occasional instance when he opted to pay using his "charge card." I, of course, didn’t have such an option; I would be out of my teens before I was even considered worth of a credit card, and even then, it was just for gasoline at one company’s chain of service stations.

And then it was back home, where my father would set aside the usually large pile of trains that he’d bought, pending their addition to his inventory, which was kept mostly on looseleaf pieces of paper in a binder. I would take my N Scale items downstairs to the modest layout I had, put the rolling stock on the track, run them in a train, and then stash the buildings away for later.

These Glory Days of Unmitigated Excess lasted just a few years. It only took a few After Christmas Sales for Two Guys to run out of Postage Stamp Trains, and after that, at least in the outlet we went to, the amount of N Scale was never even close to the same level. N Scale also fell off the stock lists of many retail chains, not just Two Guys, and returned to dedicated hobby shops and model railroad stores. Two Guys, along with the other stores of my youth: E.J. Korvettes, Great Eastern, Grants, and Woolworth’s, would all be gone, succeeded by the larger entities that put them out of business, if poor management decisions like overexpansion didn’t do them in first. For a few after-Christmases, though, the Two Guys After-Christmas Sale gave those more publicized events like the one at Filene’s Basement a run for their money.

Back in the present day, I knew I didn’t need another bridge, no matter how impressive it looked on the cover artwork already assembled and placed in a fully scenicked scene complete with a Union Pacific locomotive heading across it with a freight train. But the same dealer had a mint condition kit for the "Two Custom Houses" that I’d never acquired at any of the Two Guys After Christmas Sales. Even though they still looked like Swiss Chalets to me, I could see using them as cottages...

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